May 8, 2007

I have been swamped with writing code for an OCR/Scanning system for my employer and being a team leader for 14 people (10 developers). Haven’t had too much time to continue Lisp development.

Recently, I had to do quarterly reviews and gave as an objective that each developer should learn a new language over the course of the next year.Each person was to choose a language they did not know and that would, hopefully, be mind expanding for them.

Most of the people on my team will be learning Python. One developer chose Erlang, though. Three others, including me, chose Haskell. No one chose Lisp or Scheme. Sad. The reasoning for Erlang and Haskell had to mainly do with wanting to learn a functional programming language that promised to be able to take advantage of the coming concurrency revolution through multiple cores.

Lisp was viewed as too old and having horrible syntax. I personally find it elegant and still far ahead of it’s time– although, I am afraid that the “ahead of it’s time” mantra is causing a lot of the community to rest on their laurels instead of pushing into the future.

I will be releasing some updates for trivial-freeimage in the upcoming weeks as well as a wrapper for the ocr engine TOCR. This little engine has outstanding character accuracy and is cheap– 40$ for the standard version and 86$ for the Euro version.